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Description
This interpretive multiple case study investigated how EFL teachers perceived and enacted the communicative and task-based language teaching curriculum and explored the influences that conditioned these processes in an urban upper-secondary school in Vietnam. The study adopted cultural-historical activity theory as its theoretical lens to shed light on the complex and dynamic interactions among individual teachers’ perceptions, practices and the social context of their work. Qualitative data were generated through multiple interviews, classroom observations and documentations over seven months. The findings revealed that the teachers aspired and struggled to enact the curriculum within the pull of the status quo. The enactment processes were non-static, dynamic and highly individualised through the teachers’ agentive engagement in the negotiation process between the old and new practices. The study identified a wide range of inter-related influences from personal, school, and broader socio-cultural contexts of teachers’ work that conditioned the teachers’ experiences of the curriculum reform. The paper concludes with the implications for language policy planning and for the implementation of teacher support in response to curriculum change.
